seventy2
don't you diss on microsoft's late addition to the mp3 world. it learned from others mistakes. and created it's own.

Those who learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to make new ones :p

Ironscarf
You nearly knock some poor guy off his bike then to add insult to injury, you racially abuse him ?

What is wrong with you tonight???

This is AH-MURIKAH.

AND IN AHMURIKAH you ride your bike in the correct direction and don't run red lights unless you're a delivery person, whom generally have enough control of their bicycles to avoid pedestrians. ) :

I forgot to tell you guys about my latest job-related rant.

I had my 6-month performance review the other day. This is supposed to be accompanied by a (maximum) 15 cent raise. I did good on my review, “met expectations” and everything. But the district manager decided that until our store's sales go up(which they are not going to, it's beyond our control), no one can have a raise.
First of all, I was hired at “competitive wages” - 50 cents above minimum wage. A couple months after I was hired, minimum wage went up 50 cents, and my pay rate stayed the same. So I'm making minimum wage.
If I work 15 hours a week for a year, a 15 cent raise would have added up to 117 dollars. (I should probably specify here that we're only one store in a relatively large chain of stores, so that really is peanuts.)

Apparently my reward for being a good, hard-working employee is a big old slap in the face.

—

I can't remember if I posted a while back about our district manager watching us with the security cameras…that was upsetting, too. I actually found something in our employee handbook thingy yesterday saying that's not allowed. I probably won't do anything with that information, but it makes me feel good knowing I'm not just a whiner. : P

Genejoke

Hippie Van
Today we had a substitute teacher who told them “IN ENGLISH” and that it was “rude” to have conversations in languages other than English….

Bet she was paranoid about what they might be saying about her.

Bet they didn't even mention here before she made an arse of herself…

Ironscarf
What is wrong with you tonight???

OOOooo, you're a bastard lol!

seventy2
i've lost 3 pounds in the last 5 days.

Don't worry, maybe you'll find them again somewhere. :(

Katch
i get a letter in the mail today from them…it's a bill for FIVE DOLLARS…WHAT THE SHIT ORTHOPEDICS!!? D: <

Cheap. You on Socialised healthcare? That's unAmerican!

Hippie Van
I can't remember if I posted a while back about our district manager watching us with the security cameras…that was upsetting, too. I actually found something in our employee handbook thingy yesterday saying that's not allowed. I probably won't do anything with that information, but it makes me feel good knowing I'm not just a whiner. : P

Take it up with his boss. What a cock.
With the raise thing, I'd be on the lookout for another job at the same time as you're working the current one. There has to consequences for not looking after employees correctly, i.e. they find new jobs.

———

Trying to do the latest page of my comic… I needed my notebook because the scene is written out in careful detail with all action worked out meticulously. But it was nowhere to be found! I spent hour checking and rechecking my desk drawers, checking every book case, under my bead on top of cupboards… Going through all my old sketch books to see if I wrote the scene in them, before I remember which one I had written in it.
It got me in a really sad and frustrated mood at the end of the night and I'd produced almost nothing because of it. I resigned myself to doing the thing from memory- I always miss out good stuff when I do it from memory.

Anyway, when I finally flopped into bed, utterly defeated, I happened to turn around and look at the books in the bookshelf above my pillow… And there it was, neatly stacked away.
…Just as I had admitted defeat, had retreated and was settling off for sleep. WTF? After all that hard work of searching, stacking and unstacking etc. and all I had to do was reach over behind my head as I was comfortably lying in my bed.
Left me dumbfounded.

ozoneocean

Genejoke

Hippie Van
Today we had a substitute teacher who told them “IN ENGLISH” and that it was “rude” to have conversations in languages other than English….

Bet she was paranoid about what they might be saying about her.

Bet they didn't even mention here before she made an arse of herself…

Haha, that's what I was thinking, too. Also, we have tons of new immigrants in Canada so I have no idea why she's got a bee in her bonnet…good lord, I hope she isn't on the streets yelling at them as well.

ozoneocean

Hippie Van
I can't remember if I posted a while back about our district manager watching us with the security cameras…that was upsetting, too. I actually found something in our employee handbook thingy yesterday saying that's not allowed. I probably won't do anything with that information, but it makes me feel good knowing I'm not just a whiner. : P

Take it up with his boss. What a cock.
With the raise thing, I'd be on the lookout for another job at the same time as you're working the current one. There has to consequences for not looking after employees correctly, i.e. they find new jobs.

I'd like to say something to her, but she's scary. : (

I need to look for a new job anyways because I'll need full time come summer. I bet all of us will quit around the same time, too. I think we're all looking. If I quit on my own they'll just get another trained monkey, but that'll be a REAL consequence when they've got a store and no employees. : )

Dodger

Ironscarf
You nearly knock some poor guy off his bike then to add insult to injury, you racially abuse him ?

What is wrong with you tonight???

This is AH-MURIKAH.

AND IN AHMURIKAH you ride your bike in the correct direction and don't run red lights unless you're a delivery person, whom generally have enough control of their bicycles to avoid pedestrians. ) :

Well this is ENGERLAND, where cyclists do whatever they damn well please and swear a lot at pedestrians. Why should we change our ways just because we're in a foreign country? I don't see your Ronald McDonald selling cod and chips do I? No - he comes over here as if he thinks he owns the place, with his tasteless burgers in extruded sponge rolls and his melted ice cream you're supposed to suck through a straw - can't even be bother to shell out on a decent freezer - grraagh!

Ironscarf

Dodger

Ironscarf
You nearly knock some poor guy off his bike then to add insult to injury, you racially abuse him ?

What is wrong with you tonight???

This is AH-MURIKAH.

AND IN AHMURIKAH you ride your bike in the correct direction and don't run red lights unless you're a delivery person, whom generally have enough control of their bicycles to avoid pedestrians. ) :

Well this is ENGERLAND, where cyclists do whatever they damn well please and swear a lot at pedestrians. Why should we change our ways just because we're in a foreign country? I don't see your Ronald McDonald selling cod and chips do I? No - he comes over here as if he thinks he owns the place, with his tasteless burgers in extruded sponge rolls and his melted ice cream you're supposed to suck through a straw - can't even be bother to shell out on a decent freezer - grraagh!

Its like that all over Britland. Not to worry though. In a few more years it will all be run into the ground.
Especially with the Olympics. They say its going do draw in tourism but I think it'll be the prime minister throwing a big expencive party that noone wants to turn up to because they have better things to do. The only ones who go are the ones who have too.
“Where are we racing this year?”
“London.”
“Fuck it. Lets go outrun some lions.”

Ever since David Cameron's been prime minister I feel that not one things been done right. Infact 4 weeks after he got elected I didnt even know we had a new one.

Hippie Van

ozoneocean

Genejoke

Hippie Van
Today we had a substitute teacher who told them “IN ENGLISH” and that it was “rude” to have conversations in languages other than English….

Bet she was paranoid about what they might be saying about her.

Bet they didn't even mention here before she made an arse of herself…

Haha, that's what I was thinking, too. Also, we have tons of new immigrants in Canada so I have no idea why she's got a bee in her bonnet…good lord, I hope she isn't on the streets yelling at them as well.

I just saw this and it reminded me of your post. WOW. Wonder if she's related to your substitute.

A Reaver
Ever since David Cameron's been prime minister I feel that not one things been done right. Infact 4 weeks after he got elected I didnt even know we had a new one.

Cameron and his old Etonians are going to finish what Thatcher couldn't and it's like the whole country is in some kind of trance - they've all swallowed this mantra that everything Cameron does is necessary because of the labour government. Wake up people - labour are not the government anymore! We're going right back to the bad old days of the eighties with mass unemployment and no local amenities and despair and Duran Duran.

People will wake up and start rioting again soon though - you've got to draw the line somewhere. Nobody wants Duran Duran. D:

Genejoke
I just saw this and it reminded me of your post. WOW. Wonder if she's related to your substitute

And that made me think how strange it is that in the UK “Asian” usually refers to people from India, Pakistan etc. while elsewhere (like the idiot in the vid) it means Chinese, Japanese people etc.
Still racist, but radically different meanings.

Ironscarf
People will wake up and start rioting again soon though - you've got to draw the line somewhere. Nobody wants Duran Duran. D:

He's hungry like a wolf!



Death by the Orgasmatron is probably preferable to Cameron's UK.

But back to the 80's… I only liked that Hungry Like a Wolf song. This current back to the 80's fad surely must be waning by now????? I see straight young men walking about with brightly coloured short shorts, Sunglasses with coloured plastic rims, white t-shirts with horrible geometric rainbow colours vomited on them in crude shapes… In the 80's only little children dressed like that because those clothes were bought by their mums.

i like england. they have pubs and kebabs. we have bars and peanuts. no comparison.
——-

i never had to work retail. i worked fast food when i was in college, but that didn't last long. i got fired for not being there, when i had already traded days with someone else. i tried looking for another job, but all the ones taken were weird hours, because all the students had already taken the non-weird hours.
—

i creeped myself out this morning. morning routine goes:
alarm 1. dismiss
alarm 2. open phone and look at facebook.

upon reading facebook someone had posted “why's there an owl outside my window” and i replied “alien”. which is a reference to the movie “the fourth kind” just in case you didn't watch the movie or the preview, it's about aliens abducting people, but all people remember is an owl staring at them from their window.
anyways, so i look over, and there's a shadow at my window. i look at the door, and there are no lights on outside my room (which my wife always leaves on before coming to bed)
i freaked out major. now i'm awake.

the reason aliens scare me so much, is because when you think about what you believe in, they exist. growing up christian, it was theorized that they were demons. but if you read the bible, we weren't God's first creations, we probably weren't his last.
evolution? sure earth hit the perfect primordial ooze combination…for what we evolved into today… but that doesn't mean everything else out there evolves the same way.
and then movies portray aliens as evil 90% of the time. so i've been brainwashed into fearing them.

I sometimes think WE'RE the aliens. Our very primitive one celled ancestors probably crash landed here on a rock, being kept alive in spore form deep within the meteorite that landed on Earth. And when the conditions became ripe for them to come out, well…

Now there's 6 billion or so of us and our evolution as effectively stopped thanks to our technological prowess. Or maybe our evolution went in a completely different direction in which technology is involved…

I better stop thinking too deep. Long ago I could think like this all day. I try to do it now and sometimes I can feel my brain overheating. And I think I can feel smoke coming out of my ears… O_O

*goes back to blowing up Captain Picard's Ready Room and the U.S.S. Enterprise D's bridge in Duke Nukem 3D*

If you rewound evolution and let it run again it wouldn't run the same way again. Things could be very different because before each of the great extinctions they were very different. We're only here because of several events that brought everything nearly back to the beginning again with all the large animals having to choose up the roles all over again.

Just thing we could have all been birds without that impact 65 Million years ago. I don't go with dinosaurs necessarily I kind of like the idea of being flightless birds rather than bipedal dinosaurs. Planet of the Penguins with opposable thumbs!

Now that would be a frightening alien invasion. Giant electic penguins with tentacles! Help us Scott of the Antarctic.

—

Was it even inevitable that Homo Sapiens made it over Homo Neaderthalis? Maybe Neanderthal was too specialized and couldn't adapt to a non-arctic enviornment as well as Sapiens. And face it with a nine month gestation and interminable childhood (in terms of the Animal kingdom) humans evolve slowly but can adapt quickly because of that long childhood. Humans have to learn everything and that can be adjusted to suit prevailing conditions. After all Arabs, Apaches and Inuits are all from the same species.

Animals evolve to adapt physically to changing conditions. Humans just adapt how they live to changing conditions. Why change physically when all that has to be done is to change diet and clothing? Humans are highly adaptable without technology or phycial changes that would differentiate them into seperate species. So humans don't have to evolve in a highly noticable fashion necessarily.

Melannin, eye folds, disease incidence or immunity and food allergies are the main human adaptions to their enviornment. They evolve but don't expect a new species anytime soon.

seventy2
i like england. they have pubs and kebabs. we have bars and peanuts. no comparison.
——-

You dont have kebabs?!
But… how else do you wake up with a bad garlicy chilliy taste in your mouth and a bunch of stains down a perfectly good jacket?

The electricity went off again. Im not surprised. It went off at my girlfriends yesterday about 5 times and it did the same last week. I have nothing to do now but type… Think of something to rant about… hmmmm…

Art!

So Im starting my 3rd and final term of college. Ive gotten through the rest just barely. This is where it all counts now. And I cant think of a theme. I was gonna do modern day propaganda but that causes too much conflict with personal beliefs and dislikes and everyone else's. Not to mention the fact that it would all be about David Cameron and Nick Clegg being well dressed trolls who rob the poor as they pass over a bridge.

Im not usually into those facebook groups but there are a few that have recently grabbed my attention.

Throwing eggs at david cameron. Brick shaped eggs. Made of brick.
and
Im sorry im late miss. David Cameron and Nick Clegg stopped me and stole my EMA.

Then again theyre hardly groups. I just found their names funny.

So… whos excited about the olympics?
I really couldnt be arsed with having to listen to it.
Fortunately I got rid of the TV in my room so thats 50% of the Olympic media gone from my view.

God this is boring….

Ah its back on.

A Reaver
God this is boring…

Listen to the Quackcast! We have a new one up!!!
^_^

ozoneocean

A Reaver
God this is boring…

Listen to the Quackcast! We have a new one up!!!
^_^

Would have if I could get online. Just thad the reply page open. Ill listen later. Have to go pay the rent now.

Good lord. Last year when I realised it was too late to apply for art college, I had two choices. 1) I get a job for a year, or 2) I go to some part time courses for a bunch of stuff.

I obviously took the slackers way and went with 2, but gordon bennet what a horrible mistake. Okay so I figure Photoshop will be a nice course, not to mention easy. Didn't wanna start off too hard so take the beginner course. Breezed through that, did the stuff in about 30 minutes, then stared at the wall for 1 hour 30 minutes in boredom. Okay so that was only once a week course, I figure when that was over I'd go to Photoshop intermediate, that must be harder, I'd bet.

I do the stuff in the 10 minutes the teacher takes to explain the work, then it's 1 hour 50 minutes of staring at the wall. GOOD. LORD.

IF IT IS REALLY POSSIBLE TO DIE OF BOREDOM MY LIFE IS IN SERIOUS DANGER.
That course is nearly over, but I can only imagine what the Photoshop advanced course is like…

I think the only course of action left is to get my portfolio ready, then make another portfolio to mash with my first one, that way I will get in to art college and I will not have to go through these god damn courses again ever in my life. GOD.

Learned something nice today. Butter is better than vegetable oil for frying eggs. The eggs don't stick to the pan so easily and the yolks don't break before I want them to. Now I can look forward to making my 12 fried egg sub for breakfast (with lots of fried bacon, sliced ham, and stir fried shredded potatoes). I can feel my arteries getting hard and my heart pumping more forcefully just thinking about it…

mmmmmm… :)

I am just shocked at how well my bunny and my siamese are getting along. They've been playing together since I got home and just now I caught Annie grooming the bunny.
Or maybe she was just tasting her. Hard to say. : P

Hippie Van
I am just shocked at how well my bunny and my siamese are getting along. They've been playing together since I got home and just now I caught Annie grooming the bunny.
Or maybe she was just tasting her. Hard to say. : P

I figure that your cat is well fed and that it considers the bunny to be part of her “family”. Now if that cat was starving, she'd really be tasting that lagomorph and waiting for the perfect opportunity to let out those hunting instincts…

Hippie Van
I got home and just now I caught Annie grooming the bunny.
Or maybe she was just tasting her. Hard to say. : P

*gulp*

—

My god - horrible eighties came back sooner than we thought: apparently British eighties reggae star Smiley Culture just died in his home from “self inflicted stab wounds” while being arrested. Back then, black folks regularly stabbed, shot, strangled, kicked and otherwise murdered themselves while being arrested. R.I.P. Smiley.

Sometimes I walk to places and I wonder to myself:

“Maybe they're somebody from the duck!”

And then I tell myself that not everyone from the duck has to be the freaky.


But in other news I still could care less about Japan and its issues, just save the Nintendo/Kingdom Hearts stuff (LAME), and…yeah…

…

Comments on my blue hair have been priceless.

EDITS WITHOUT THE REAL EDITNESS OF IT:
Three new Things to go with this rant:
1. I posted this rant on the wrong forum at first.
2. I am about to listen to oz's accent.
3. Africa has a hell of a lot of people with AIDS on it.

Lonnehart
Learned something nice today. Butter is better than vegetable oil for frying eggs. The eggs don't stick to the pan so easily and the yolks don't break before I want them to. Now I can look forward to making my 12 fried egg sub for breakfast (with lots of fried bacon, sliced ham, and stir fried shredded potatoes). I can feel my arteries getting hard and my heart pumping more forcefully just thinking about it…

mmmmmm… :)

that's better for you thank you think it is.

Just go light on the butter :)

-

I'm 11-1/2 stones already. It's been many a year since i've seen that number on the scale. that brings the total to almost half a stone….i'm hoping to drop to just above 10-11 stone.

the aliens are still watching.

Today was the first day in the past two weeks where I told my best friend “Imma gonna draw instead of being emotionally available.” It was hard, because he texted me with some interesting updates and I see some potential for danger that no one would see without having heard all of the involved parties talk separately. But after awhile of feeling like your social life is a game of Sims and yer in god mode, it gets a little cumbersome ._.

Instead I finally sat down and started scripting book 2 of FAIL, with the working title of Natural Disasters. Only scripted about 20 pages, but it's taken an interesting angle already. The first page that I've finished is the main character wading through a New Orleans street during Hurricane Katrina.

It's amazing how finishing a page can sometimes be enough to get you enthusiastic about something again.

Just finished watching The Pacific Some of those episodes are so intense you can't watch them back-to-back. You could really see the efforts they took to get it right and not skip in making it feel and look real.
And it's about two hometown boys. Robert Leckie and John Basilone were both from New Jersey. You see stuff all over named for him just like it's said at the end of the series.
Another personal connection. John Basilone was a machine gunner and killed on Iwo Jima like my great uncle Vladimir.

Someone
I'm 11-1/2 stones already. It's been many a year since i've seen that number on the scale. that brings the total to almost half a stone….i'm hoping to drop to just above 10-11 stone.

Damn, I'm like two of you.

ugh… I've been trying to motivate myself back into drawing, but soon as I lift up my stylus I end up dropping it and I wake up minutes later. What in the heck…?

It doesn't help that I've got a large water bill to deal with thanks to a leak in my main water pipe that I can't block because it's buried under a ton of dirt. Oh, well… spending $200 will put a crimp in my lifestyle for a few weeks, but at least I managed to get enough pipe to reach from the meter to my house. Now if only the water company would respond to my request for them to come over and tell me which water meter belongs to me (there are three of them in one spot) so I can get to work on hooking up the new PVC pipe… It really sucks when you use less than 5k gallons a month and that suddenly goes up to 32k gallons a month thanks to a leak you can't see…

Genejoke
Damn, I'm like two of you.

I'd pry be much larger if i hadn't wrestled in highschool. My freshman year i was 160 pounds, and i dropped to 130. The state said i could go to 118.7 and still be safe at 10% body fat. coach didn't want me to tho. and i ended up staying in that range for most of high school. 130-140-145-135. i was 150 when i entered the military, and the first year i jumped to 160. then sometime my wife left me, and i was over 21, so i jumped up to near 200 pounds. but for most of that to come off all i had to do was stop drinking. (i posted drunk a lot on DD back then). the last couple years of exercise have made me average 167, with small variations here and there.
—–

Lonnehart
Water pipe busted

That's the one thing that has always made me glad that i rent. I don't have to fix, or pay to fix nearly anything that goes wrong. but it does suck when your landlord is crap. but i have yet to run into that.

the downside is you can't really customize your living space. you can arrange funiture, but you can't paint the walls, and you're only allowed to put x amount of holes in the walls, and can only have y sized holes.

A girl got stabbed at college today for trying to break up a fight.
And I was only a few meters away.

Loads of temp agencies are for warehouse jobs. I apparently can't interview for those, presumably due to education. I mean they don't even ask, they're just like “Ah, sorry, we deal with warehouses!” I must commute to places where they'll hopefully give me clerical work, for which I'm often also overqualified.

I'm pretty frustrated about this, and a little sad that my long-held dream of being a long-haul trucker if all else fails is beyond me now. Now if all else fails, I legitimately can't do anything!